


Nomad

by doublejoint



Series: peachtober 2020 [12]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: KNBxNBA, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26979139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: Five places Tatsuya lives
Relationships: Himuro Tatsuya/Kagami Taiga
Series: peachtober 2020 [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953295
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Nomad

**Author's Note:**

> #peachtober Day 12: Foam
> 
> Happy kagahimu 10/12 (though this is mostly about tatsuya)

Taiga’s already on his second lease when Tatsuya gets his first. It’s not a competition, he reminds himself; besides, this apartment doesn’t even count. His mother is his guarantor; he’s rooming with three teammates in a building full of other students with a bedroom barely big enough for a double bed, a night table, and a dresser. Taiga’s already gone pro, but Tatsuya’s still in college, a year ahead on his birth certificate but still a stage behind somehow.

At least he’s out of the dorm and the dining hall, outside of the mercy of the tiny student housing kitchens. He can cook all the recipes Taiga’s been sending him without his parents complaining about him using up their groceries at home, as soon as he buys the right equipment. He’s getting his own bills in the mail, paying for them with the money he’d saved up from summer jobs, and he’s a year away from entering the workforce in some way, shape, or form (the draft, it had better be the draft; this is his year). 

He puts together the coffee table two of his roomates bring back from IKEA, sets it up in front of the couch he’d snagged from his parents’ next-door neighbor, and snaps a picture on his phone to send to Taiga.

_ Cozy, _ Taiga types back.

_ Wait til you see the bedroom, _ Tatsuya replies.

* * *

Tatsuya does indeed get drafted, in the second round by the Knicks, and sent straight to the G League in the second round of cuts in training camp. It’s better than some alternatives; at least the team wants to keep him close by, just in case. Lots of people could get injured or traded. Tatsuya’s never been much of an optimist, though. He shares an apartment in Westchester with two of his new teammates who are looking for a third now that their old roommate decided to hang up his shoes. 

Tatsuya’s parents ship out his furniture from California, the bed frame and the cheap foam mattress, the dresser and the end table, and his cooking stuff. There’s barely room for it in the tiny, dark kitchen, but Tatsuya crams it in somehow, and the kitchen’s most of what Taiga sees, the few times he’s in for a game and Tatsuya’s also in town, and in the background of the pictures Tatsuya sends of the food he makes--cinnamon rolls, mapo tofu, sloppily-folded gyoza, pizza with pickles on top, a whole roasted turkey for one Thanksgiving that somehow makes it through the dicey oven okay.

* * *

The first couple of times Tatsuya gets called up, he gets sent back down almost straight away. The third time, there’s a slew of injuries and Tatsuya knows he’s been doing well, knows he can get minutes, and he does. The Knicks are fucking terrible, but Tatsuya scores ten, fifteen, twenty-five points off the bench, starts three games in a row, two of which they win. His face is on the back of the  _ News _ and the  _ Post _ , in color on the bottom of the  _ Times _ . He’s still commuting back and forth from Westchester on the Metro-North. 

They re-up him at the end of the season for more money than he’s made in two years of the G League, and basically promise him a starting spot. 

Ultimately, his worries about making the wrong bet crumble when faced with the reality of being able to afford his own damn place with a decent commute and a real kitchen with a reliable oven. But maybe it’s just this summer, that seems perfect in a way that none has since a long, long time ago when he’d just moved to California and learned how to play basketball, how to take and make a shot, how to receive a pass and dribble past someone bigger and stronger than he was. He’s a real NBA player; he’s been recognized once or twice on the street. Publications call his parents on the phone. And he can’t pretend not to know what Taiga means when he reaches out his hands, can’t shy away from his gestures, can’t deny to either of them that he wants this, too. And maybe it’ll all come crashing down on him, but he’s twenty-four and he’s only young once and he’s going to enjoy it, at least for a little bit.

Taiga helps him move his stuff in, in a borrowed car; it all fits with a little room to spare. For someone who has trouble getting rid of things, Tatsuya doesn’t have much--but most of it’s with his parents, and, really, he’s made a conscious effort not to acquire more. His apartment is empty, and he knows if Taiga stays here longer than a week he’s going to make him at least buy a couch at a thrift store or something, but Tatsuya would rather not get too much. Just in case he has to leave again.

* * *

He spends all of a season and a half after that with the Knicks, barely sniffing the postseason but staying healthy and productive and trying to say the right canned phrases in press conferences even as they land about as appetizing as lukewarm chicken soup. Talking about trying your best means nothing when you lose over and over again, go back to the same apartment and watch TV until you fall asleep, or stress bake more cookies than you want to eat in a month.

He mails those express to Taiga, in the middle of a successful homestand on the way to a one seed in Chicago. Taiga sends back a picture of him eating one; there are crumbs on his mouth. Tatsuya would have rather they baked the cookies together.

A year and a half in the apartment, and the time is coming up on lease extension, and Tatsuya gets traded to Miami at the deadline, leaving behind his apartment and his furniture and his cooking stuff and his mail. They get him a hotel room in Miami, with an ocean view and palm trees outside, valet parking if he wants a car, and he’s old enough to rent one now. There are boxes in his bedroom in New York that he hadn’t even fully unpacked. He should probably just get rid of the couch, even though he’d bought it with Taiga and they’d argued about where it looked best even though Taiga wasn’t even going to live there, and after that first stretch of time they’d stayed there together, had barely spent more time there than he had in the Westchester apartment.

One of Tatsuya’s new teammates offers to refer him to a broker in Miami, but Tatsuya declines. How long’s he going to be here, anyway? What’s the point of settling down if he doesn’t know if he wants to stay, or if the team wants him to stay?

At least they make the playoffs, even if they go down in five games to Philadelphia.

* * *

“You should just come here,” Taiga says. “If you want to.”

Tatsuya nearly drops the phone; in his scramble to keep it steady, the strip of packing tape twists against the box, all wrong. Shit, he’s going to have to do that again. 

“Tatsuya?”

“I’m here,” Tatsuya says, tearing off the tape with a slice of his mail key. “Packing malfunction. But I’m listening.”

“I miss playing with you,” says Taiga. “Chicago’s nice; you’ll like living here.”

“That wouldn’t be the main attraction,” Tatsuya says dryly, and shit, they should have video chatted or something, because he’d love to see Taiga’s face right about now.

“Tatsuya,” he whines.

“That fried chicken place you took me to was good,” says Tatsuya. “I like your neighborhood.”

Taiga says nothing, and Tatsuya presses the tape down against the flaps of the box, sealing it up.

“If I moved in with you I wouldn’t have to buy furniture.”

Again, silence. Tatsuya surveys the living room. He can put that throw rug in with some pots and pans--if he really needs to keep it. Does he need to keep it? Why isn’t Taiga answering?

“I was thinking we could look for a place together. Maybe.”

“How much have you been thinking about this?”

“A lot,” Taiga confesses, and Tatsuya can tell he’s pressing the phone closer to his face. 

He sits down on the couch, wiping the sweat off his brow. 

“I need to sign a contract first,” Tatsuya says, to remind them both--this is all speculative.

“We’re weak at guard,” says Taiga. “They’ve seen us play together in the last world championships.”

If this were a landline, Tatsuya would twist his fingers in the coils of the cord to give them something to do. 

“You’d better vouch for me,” he says, finally.

“Damn right I will,” says Taiga. 

**Author's Note:**

> i believe this is a plausible timeline WRT the way NBA contracts work, but please let me know if it is not!


End file.
